Ampere (microarchitecture)

Ampere
LaunchedMay 14, 2020; 4 years ago (2020-05-14)
Designed byNvidia
Manufactured by
Fabrication processTSMC N7 (professional)
Samsung 8N (consumer)
Codename(s)GA10x
Product Series
Desktop
Professional/workstation
  • RTX A series
Server/datacenter
  • A100
Specifications
L1 cache192 KB per SM (professional)
128 KB per SM (consumer)
L2 cache2 MB to 6 MB
Memory support
PCIe supportPCIe 4.0
Supported Graphics APIs
DirectXDirectX 12 Ultimate (Feature Level 12_2)
Direct3DDirect3D 12.0
Shader ModelShader Model 6.8
OpenCLOpenCL 3.0
OpenGLOpenGL 4.6
CUDACompute Capability 8.6
VulkanVulkan 1.3
Media Engine
Encode codecs
Decode codecs
Color bit-depth
  • 8-bit
  • 10-bit
Encoder(s) supportedNVENC
Display outputs
History
PredecessorTuring (consumer)
Volta (professional)
SuccessorAda Lovelace (consumer)
Hopper (datacenter)
Support status
Supported

Ampere is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to both the Volta and Turing architectures. It was officially announced on May 14, 2020 and is named after French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère.[1][2]

Nvidia announced the Ampere architecture GeForce 30 series consumer GPUs at a GeForce Special Event on September 1, 2020.[3][4] Nvidia announced the A100 80 GB GPU at SC20 on November 16, 2020.[5] Mobile RTX graphics cards and the RTX 3060 based on the Ampere architecture were revealed on January 12, 2021.[6]

Nvidia announced Ampere's successor, Hopper, at GTC 2022, and "Ampere Next Next" (Blackwell) for a 2024 release at GPU Technology Conference 2021.

  1. ^ Newsroom, NVIDIA. "NVIDIA's New Ampere Data Center GPU in Full Production". NVIDIA Newsroom Newsroom. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  2. ^ "NVIDIA Ampere Architecture In-Depth". NVIDIA Developer Blog. May 14, 2020.
  3. ^ "NVIDIA Delivers Greatest-Ever Generational Leap with GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs". Nvidia Newsroom. September 1, 2020. Retrieved April 9, 2023.
  4. ^ "NVIDIA GeForce Ultimate Countdown". Nvidia.
  5. ^ "NVIDIA Doubles Down: Announces A100 80GB GPU, Supercharging World's Most Powerful GPU for AI Supercomputing". Nvidia Newsroom. November 16, 2020. Retrieved April 9, 2023.
  6. ^ "NVIDIA GeForce Beyond at CES 2023". NVIDIA.